• 0 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle





  • All of those kinds of communities, where people tell anecdotes about their lives, turned into creative writing excerises for wannabe authors long before we had to worry about AI slop. TIFU, AmITheAsshole, RelationshipAdvice, etc. were all getting pretty derivative and sensational for clicks long before the exodus. Now they’re all either that or illiterate attention seekers showing off the results of their latest LLM prompts. I liked those stories too, but I don’t want anything to do with any of those communities anymore. It all just turned into a training ground for LLMs generating engagement. YouTube still tries to force those dumb AI story voiceover videos to me constantly. We used to joke that “nothing ever happens”, but everyday that sentiment feels a little less cynical and a little more real.





  • Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read. A detective (wait was this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, maybe? I don’t remember, anyway) is looking for a person and asking around. I stead of carrying around a picture of the person they are looking for, they compare the person’s features to a list of celebrities and just go around asking if anyone has seen someone that looks like that celebrity. Point being lots of people have surprisingly similar features and there really are “doppelgangers” out there.

    But just try explaining that to some stranger that just caught you staring off into space directly at their face because they look like a person you had a crush on in college, only you’re an old fart now and they don’t look like that old crush would look now, but like the memory you have of them. “You look like someone I know” always sounds like a pickup line.


  • It’s not a completely different thing. They were both trying to fully integrate the operating system and the web browser into one monolithic and inescapable thing: Windows XP + Internet Explorer to squash competition on the desktop; Linux + Chrome to squash competition on laptops; Android + Chrome OS to squash competition in the mobile space. The money to be made on operating systems is trivial in the consumer space compared to the power of control over platforms (like web browsers) that deliver advertisements and harvest data from comsumers. M$ saw the writing on the wall way back then in their fight with Netscape Navigator. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    I feel like I’m talking to an AI chatbot completely unable to reason abstractly or consider the full context of the conversation.








  • The best part is the random bill.

    • Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
    • Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

    The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

    Or another variant.

    • Go to the emergency room.
    • Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

    The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.



  • Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.